Critical Flaws Found in Siemens Telecontrol, Building Automation Products

Siemens informed customers this week that critical vulnerabilities have been found in some of its telecontrol and building automation products, and revealed that some SIMATIC systems are affected by a high severity flaw.

One advisory published by the company describes several critical and high severity flaws affecting Siveillance and Desigo building automation products. The security holes exist due to the use of a vulnerable version of a Gemalto license management system (LMS).

The bugs affect Gemalto Sentinel LDK and they can be exploited for remote code execution and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

The vulnerabilities were discovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab and disclosed in January. The security firm warned at the time that millions of industrial and corporate systems may be exposed to remote attacks due to their use of the vulnerable Gemalto product.

Siemens warned at the time that more than a dozen versions of the SIMATIC WinCC Add-On were affected. The company has now informed customers that some of its building automation products are impacted as well, including Siveillance Identity and SiteIQ Analytics, and Desigo XWP, CC, ABT, Configuration Manager, and Annual Shading.

The German industrial giant has advised customers to update the LMS to version 2.1 SP4 (2.1.681) or newer in order to address the vulnerabilities.

A separate advisory published by Siemens this week informs customers of a critical vulnerability affecting TIM 1531 IRC, a communication module launched by the company nearly a year ago. The module connects remote stations based on SIMATIC controllers to a telecontrol control center through the Sinaut ST7 protocol.

“A remote attacker with network access to port 80/tcp or port 443/tcp could perform administrative operations on the device without prior authentication. Successful exploitation could allow to cause a denial-of-service, or read and manipulate data as well as configuration settings of the affected device,” Siemens explained.

The company said there had been no evidence of exploitation when it published its advisory on Tuesday.

A third advisory published by Siemens this week describes a high severity flaw discovered by external researchers in SIMATIC PCS 7, SIMATIC WinCC, SIMATIC WinCC Runtime Professional, and SIMATIC NET PC products.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to cause a DoS condition on the impacted products by sending specially crafted messages to their RPC service. Patches or mitigations have been made available by Siemens for each of the affected systems.

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.